Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, Stephen Jacobson, eds. Endless
Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline.
Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. 477??pp. $29.95
(paper), ISBN 978-0-299-29024-5.
Reviewed by Kevin Kim (Stanford University)
Published on H-Diplo (August, 2013)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
How much should scholars of post-World War II international history
care about empire in an era marked by the spread of democracy and
collapsing colonial societies across the globe? A great deal, comes
the resounding reply from a recent edited volume, _Endless Empire:
Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's_ _Decline_. Spurred by
signs of declining U.S. global dominance, Southeast Asia historian
Alfred W. McCoy and his Barcelona-based coeditors, Josep M. Fradera
and Stephen Jacobson, gathered a wide-ranging set of essays that
confront a central question emerging from a global network of
scholarly conferences since 2008. "Does Europe's decolonization over
the past two centuries offer insights," McCoy poses this question,
"about the ongoing decline of U.S. global power?" (p. 4). Roving
across six continents and three centuries of global comparative
history from imperial Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, and New
Zealand to postcolonial societies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas,
_Endless Empire_'s contributors have more than met McCoy's challenge.
Eschewing simplistic declensionism, instrumentalist "lessons of the
past" approaches, and moralistic judgments about empire, they provide
a rich, globally vast portrait of imperial decline that should
interest scholars engaged in any aspect of history touched by
empire's receding, relentlessly grasping tendrils.
Such tendrils, _Endless Empire _suggests, left few lives or
communities untouched. No empire, its editors argue, was more
powerful than the United States after World War II. However, the U.S.
empire, they warn, peaked around 1990, when "Washington
Consensus"-styled policies dominated the global economy and U.S.
military power underwrote U.S. and pro-U.S. elites' stewardship of
the world. Though U.S. officials deny the mere thought of U.S. global
decline, _Endless Empire _notes, a growing number of influential
voices and hard global facts--drastic slippages in U.S. global
economic and educational rankings; increasingly ineffective bouts of
U.S. military intervention; the rise of China and other BRIC (Brazil,
Russia, India, and China) nations--have made the notion clich??. "The
time is gone," former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker said, after
the People's Republic of China rejected the Barack Obama
administration's pleas to reevaluate the yuan and thereby ameliorate
the U.S.-China trade gap, "when the U.S. could lay claim as the
putative superpower" (p. 24). By most standards, the United States
remains the world's preponderant power. Yet, as McCoy warns (with
European imperialists' hubris much in mind), "even at the apex of
power, empires germinate seeds of decline unnoticed until they burst
forth in a fatal florescence" (p. 5).
The book is not overly concerned with declining U.S. or Western
hegemony; it is not even that concerned with the United States, or
any other nation or empire, for that matter. It is concerned with
imperial decline as a historical process, with recasting local and
global histories by interrogating empire--the dominant global
political form, after all, for much human history. One cannot do
this, Fradera observes, by writing solely about metropoles or
colonies, oppressors or the oppressed, imperial triumphs or
tragedies. "We also need to assess the complex parallels and
intersections among metropoles, colonies, and imperial rivals," he
writes. This history indeed revolved around "a geopolitical contest
for domination over other societies" (p. 73). But to fully depict
this, Jacobson adds, requires dispensing with the truism that empire
always ran "against the grain of modernity" (p. 74). As _Endless
Empire_ contributors show, declining empires' masters and subjects
cried for imperial reform and postcolonial federalism as often (and
sometimes more) as they cried for revolution and independence. Such
revelations illuminate not only the widening differences that finally
sundered metropole and colony, but also the less-known, strikingly
modern ties that bound them in the first place. This dual
sensibility, which suffuses the book and much of the new
historiography on empire, enables readers unfamiliar with empire's
disparate subfields to better understand what made its decline so
protracted, ambivalent, and, in the end, devastatingly
precipitous.[1]
_Endless Empire _begins with the case of Spain to illustrate a point
echoed throughout the book: the nonlinear chronology of imperial
decline. Josep M. Delgado Ribas challenges the conventional narrative
of nineteenth-century Spanish imperial collapse by highlighting
sustained phases of decline and revival from the Hapsburg monarchy to
the Spanish-American War. Amid repeated systemic crises, Ribas
argues, Spanish imperialists initiated sweeping reforms and
retrenchments to resuscitate empire--from the Hapsburgs' _pacto de
sangre_ granting considerable local autonomy to its American colonies
to imperialists' experiments, under Isabel II's constitutional
monarchy, with "liberal colonialism" in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other
insular possessions after the empire's dissolution on the American
mainland (p. 45). Fradera's contribution adds a world comparative
perspective. Examining the same period, Fradera argues that Spain and
Portugal's status as "second-tier empires" in a British-led world
order was crucial to their flagging empires' survival (p. 57). To
balance Napoleonic France's global ambitions and enrich its
commercial interests, Britain pursued a pragmatic policy that
occasionally challenged, but ultimately tolerated, both powers'
dependence on slavery. Under Britain's formidable aegis, Fradera
notes, Spain and Portugal solidified Cuba and Brazil, respectively,
as lucrative bedrocks of their imperial political economies, and
gained breathing space to reconstruct their entire empires. As these
accounts suggest, empires cannot be understood as self-contained
national quests to build a "fiscal-military state," as historian John
Brewer conceptualized imperial statehood in his influential study of
Britain's rise as a major world power.[2] Empire was also produced by
geopolitical crosswinds and cultural and economic networks across
states, whose imperial quests intersected in unpredictable and
dynamic ways.
Other contributions also highlight the global, at times
transnational, dynamics of empire. Courtney Johnson explores Latin
America as a focal point of transatlantic imperial elites in the
United States and Britain. As Johnson reveals, influential British
and U.S. elites (including geographer Halford Mackinder,
transatlantic news editor William T. Stead,_ _and leading eastern
U.S. Republicans) converged on the need for Anglo-American leadership
in Latin America in the 1890s. Charting these elites' activities in
their governments, the press, the Hague Court, the Pan-American
Union, and other organizations, Johnson reminds us how shared
interests and visions among empires often drove one's own empire.
Similarly, drawing on imperial travelogues and other documents,
Mar??a Dolores Elizalde traces the role of pro-imperial global
opinion in the transition from Spanish to U.S. empire in the
Philippines. Complicating the usual tale of hostile "Black Legend"
perceptions of Spain, Elizalde demonstrates how shifting,
increasingly critical European and U.S. opinion about Spanish empire
(and growing admiration for the United States' imperial potential)
facilitated U.S. replacement of Spain as the Philippines' imperial
guardian.
Turning to the colonized, Latin American historian Greg Grandin
offers a fascinating account of how Latin American politicians and
intellectuals, with their U.S. counterparts, turned U.S.-Latin
American relations, after Spain's retreat in the region, into a
crucible for Pan-American ideas that augured and influenced future
developments in international organization and law through the Cold
War. Particularly illuminating is Grandin's portrayal of the way
certain Latin American leaders, like Chilean jurist Alejandro
Alvarez, accepted and admired the Monroe Doctrine and other U.S.
legal and political principles for their consonance with Latin
American notions of international law and multilateralism, while also
adapting U.S. ideas to engage, challenge, and contain U.S. expansion
in the region. Ultimately, as British imperial historian John Darwin
argues in his synthetic overview of twentieth-century decolonization,
imperialism as a world system was shattered by World War II's
"geopolitical traumas" (p. 202). Yet as Darwin and other _Endless
Empire_ contributors suggest, while often exaggerated and
nationalistically self-serving, global empire--whether in decline,
revival, or collapse--was marked by mutual admiration, consensus, and
collaboration as much as competition, rivalry, and war.
The metropole, too, was no monolith. Several contributions
particularly make clear how its relatively privileged citizens held
variegated, contingent commitments to empire. To explain the vast
drop in popular support for Spanish imperialism in Africa and Cuba
between the 1860s and 1890s, Albert Garcia Bala???? examines
large-scale shifts in overseas colonial migration, military
recruitment, and the socioeconomic background of imperial soldiers
and settlers. Increasingly dangerous military expeditions, higher
peasant and working-class enlistments, and Latin American republics'
growing appeal to middle-class Catalonians who once fueled Spain's
imperial exploits demonstrated how, Barcelona's leading republican
newspaper regretfully put it, empire ebbed when it "no longer [was] a
social unit" (p. 103).
Two French historians, Robert Aldrich and Emmanuelle Saada,
separately paint even more sophisticated portraits of metropolitan
politics. Both suggest that French public opinion and culture, on the
surface, cared remarkably little about France's imperial outposts in
Africa and Southeast Asia. But as Saada provocatively argues in her
analysis of French constitutional and colonial culture, French
citizens' lack of strong imperial identity stemmed from a
"long-seated" self-denial about empire, and exclusionary laws and
attitudes that disingenuously treated French colonies as an
"exception" to the nation's republicanism (p. 215). Besides the
book's all too brief explorations of the interrelation of empire,
race, and ethnicity (excepting Joya Chatterji's excellent essay on
the global rise of exclusionary citizenship in India, Pakistan, and
the British Commonwealth), Aldrich's and Saada's insights into the
contradictory, ambiguous political culture of French republican
empire offer parallels with U.S. imperial experiences deserving of
further study.
For this reader, the most stimulating contributions in _Endless
Empire_ concern colonial subjects' own visions of empire. Avoiding
politically charged notions of "collaborationism" that traditionally
dominated the subject, several contributors engage fully, and
creatively, with colonial subjects' complex, changing positions on
imperial rule. As Francisco Scarano argues of pro-imperialist Cubans
and Puerto Ricans in the twilight of Spanish Caribbean empire in the
1890s, their visions--ranging from national independence to
annexation by the United States--were not merely reactionary,
neo-imperial impulses. They were rooted in a much longer history of
"pro-imperialist nationalism," Scarano argues, in which
"collaboration was principally a means toward a greater end: national
independence" (pp. 140, 145). Other contributors find similar
dynamics in other global contexts. Many emphasize the ways in which
pro-imperial colonial subjects used metropolitan power to advance
(though often with difficulty) their own projects: to integrate
peripheral provinces, as Gregory Barton shows in the Britain-Siam
case; to raise public health and education, as Warwick Anderson and
Hans Pols argue of early twentieth-century Filipino and Indonesian
doctors and scientists; and to debate citizenship rights within the
empire, as Cristina Nogueira da Silva frames Angolan, Mozambican, and
Guinean responses to Portugal's 1914 _indigenato _system.
Not only were nationalism and colonialism not inherently
incompatible, but, as the book repeatedly reminds the reader,
colonial subjects were also crucial agents of their own modernity.
Two of the book's most original accounts emphasize this point. Remco
Raben examines Indonesian mutual aid societies, local representative
bodies, civic protests, and other instances of democratic populism
spurred by Dutch imperial initiatives and grassroots Indonesian
pressures. Raben challenges the conventional view that postcolonial
Third World societies were doomed to authoritarianism because of
their peoples' supposedly "awkward" response to "West-driven
modernization." Rather, Raben argues, Indonesians, including their
first president Sukarno, crafted a "heterogeneous" democracy drawing
from both native and imperial sources from the days of colonialism
and Dutch-Indonesian war to postcolonial Indonesia (p. 277).
Indonesia's political syncretism, as Raben notes, was hardly unique
among postcolonial societies. Examining the intellectual development
of L??opold Sedar Senghor, a colonial member of the French National
Assembly who became Senegal's first president and an anticolonial
Pan-African leader in the 1950s, anthropologist Gary Wilder offers a
thought-provoking interpretation of this influential African leader's
global thought. Senghor's initial postwar program, Wilder reveals,
envisioned a global socialist French republic, with Senegal and other
former colonies included as independent, equal members of a
Francophone federation. Such ideas, contributors Aldrich and Saada
elsewhere note, were not hopelessly visionary; they echoed other
French and African leaders' proposals for "Eurafrique" federation.
Though Senghor and his supporters failed to convince French and
African leaders of this bold vision, their belief that only by
transforming metropolitan societies like France could one transform
postcolonial Africa and the wider world illustrates the pressing need
for historians today, Wilder persuasively argues, "to move beyond the
assumption that during decolonization many in the West thought
globally while colonized peoples thought nationally" (p. 231).
_Endless Empire_ is not without flaws. Many contributors' heavy
reliance on secondary sources limits the book's innovative range.
Much will thus seem familiar to specialists. For general readers,
though, the book provides entr??e to numerous foreign-language
literatures; its comparative sweep should prove instructive to
specialists, too. At times, the book's comparative
connections--especially comparing Spanish imperial decline with that
of the United States due to their similar unevenness, democratic
contradictions, and longevity--are not entirely convincing. This
relates to the book's chief shortcoming: the definition of U.S.
empire and global statecraft, generally. Several contributors
productively use the classic notion of "informal empire"--indirect,
less intrusive global dominance via non-territorial forms of
military, political, cultural, and economic influence--as a defining
feature of U.S. and British empire.[3] Indeed, contributions by Greg
Bankoff, Julian Go, Brett Reilly, and McCoy suggest important
continuities between European and U.S. global hegemony (including
economic aid, clientelism, and military coups), as well as
breathtaking U.S. innovations in military intelligence and
information technology. But what U.S. global power stands for, beyond
these tactical considerations, is unclear; where the book's Americans
seek to take the world with their neocolonialist actions remains
obscure. McCoy, the book's lead editor, offers some insight.
Americans since World War II, he notes, undertook a "global
guardianship" over a "troubled," planet unlike anything the world had
seen, while holding a "deep ambivalence" toward empire (pp. 39, 3).
Yet as any discerning reader of today's headlines might observe,
Americans, at times, continue to reap and misapprehend the defiance
of an increasingly multipolar, prosperous, globalized world they
helped create. One senses the insufficiency of empire to describe and
explain these developments. But certainly the close, open-minded
process of historical inquiry in _Endless Empire_ offers a model for
scholars interested in answers to one of empire's continuing
legacies.
Notes
[1]. For book-length studies exemplifying the new historiography on
empire, see, for instance, Robert D. Crews, _For Prophet and Tsar:
Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia_ (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006); Walter Johnson, _River of Dark Dreams:
Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom_ (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
2013); and Yumi Moon, _Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the
Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896-1910_ (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2013).
[2]. John Brewer, _The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English
State, 1688-1783 _(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), xvii.
[3]. For the classic formulation of "informal empire," see John
Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade,"
_Economic History Review_ 6 (1953): 1-15. In the U.S. context, the
work of William Appleman Williams and others remains influential.
See, especially, William Appleman Williams,_ The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy_ (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1959); and Walter
LaFeber, _The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion,
1860-1898_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).
Citation: Kevin Kim. Review of W. McCoy, Alfred; Fradera, Josep M.;
Jacobson, Stephen, eds., _Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's
Eclipse, America's Decline_. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. June, 2013.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38492
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
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